The “Al-Aqsa Flood” war, the “support war,” and the fall of the Syrian regime were not just seismic events of war; they were also a momentous ideological event that brought down the militant narratives that had reigned over the region for decades.
The Sunni Islamist ideology, through Hamas, was dealt a fatal blow that also hit the Islamist reading of the Palestinian question. As Hezbollah collapsed, radical Shiism and the vision of Lebanon as a militia base used by foreign actors met the same demise. With Assad and his regime pushed aside, Syrian Baathism was laid to rest. This last event was distinct in that it made none of the noisy claims to heroism heard in Gaza and Lebanon. The opposite happened in Iran, where the regime was hit with a blow whose immense echo was resounding in the exposure of the regime’s weakness on all fronts and the Iranian people’s growing defiance of its rule and its values.
It could be said, in sum, that an entire world, its broad currents, its conceptions, its promises, and its view of itself and of the universe, is collapsing.
Arab nationalist consciousness, represented by the Baath, falls into this category. Although those who claim that the Baath sullied this nationalist consciousness and cheapened it are correct, the fact remains that the former accompanied this consciousness on its final journey. The collapse of radical Islamic consciousness also falls within this category, and with it the resistance movements, their folklore and literature- this comes, mind you, after it had begun to occupy a central position in political culture since the arrival of the West in the late nineteenth century. Of course, the reckoning of these ideologies does not remove the need for a reckoning with the countries and peoples who were made to adopt them. Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, as well as Iran and perhaps Iraq, must confront major questions raised by these shifts and their regional and international repercussions. Ultimately, we are talking about an immensely significant and rich region of nearly 2.4 million square kilometers inhabited by more than 150 million people.
We have before us, then, abandoned ideological homes, and the magnitude of what has befallen them is difficult to understate: for one thing, they were official doctrines imposed, albeit to varying degrees, on the peoples and societies concerned; for another, they survived for more than six decades in the case of the Baathist regime and nearly five decades in the case of the Khomeinist regime. The magnitude of change is also easy to discern from another angle: the discourse emanating from the remnants of the fallen forces. The impact of this massive shock, and the denial of its occurrence, has led to a surge in magical glorification of the time that preceded the contact with the West- that is, it has precipitated a retreat from the contemporary world or the proliferation of demands that insult our intelligence with fantastical representations of reality.
This leaves us facing a void that urgently calls for reestablishing meaning and, in a sense, reestablishing time itself, to allow for a different notion of the self and the world we seek to live in.
However, the significance of this task is downplayed in some quarters, where the assumption is that “ideology is finished and the age of neutral technology has arrived.” This is despite the fact that technology is ideological- one of the key insights we received from Martin Heidegger, the doyen of anti-technologists who despised it precisely because it is ideological. To him, technology cannot be reduced to tools we use and control; they are an era’s prism for rendering the world intelligible to us. No one who has read “The Question Concerning Technology” can fail to understand that the German philosopher’s fundamental argument, in this essay that has been so ubiquitously cited since it was published 1954, is that unlike the traditional crafts that evolved through an interplay with nature, modern technology takes shape through the organization and control of the world, which is conceived as a reserve of resources whose exploitation is to be optimized. Thus, rivers become energy reservoirs, forests become stockpiles of timber, and human beings themselves become “human resources” waiting to be utilized. In Heidegger’s view, then, technology shapes how we think, not merely what we build and produce. What could be more ideological than that?
Regardless of this view, the region will not find in technology (nor in its absence) the material it urgently needs to fill the void left by the evaporation of militant ideologies: nation-building, the development of founding myths for our national communities, or perhaps picking these collectives apart and thinking of alternatives.
In this intertwined picture, however, we cannot overlook the fact that the Israeli consciousness with which these wars were waged has come out the other side victorious and triumphant. While this may seem natural, in the sense that victors of war tend to also be ideological victors, it will be extremely dangerous in light of the nationalist and religious bent and crude push for more settlement. Based on all of that, the challenges to the pursuit of alternatives to our collapsed ideologies are bound to aggravate, and the returns are bound to diminish - if such a pursuit is even allowed to begin at all.
